Red Storm Rising (1986) (59 page)

“Yes.” There was emotion in his voice now.

“You do for her then, yes?”

“Yes,” Edwards lied.
I did it for me.

“I do not know your name.”

“Mike, Michael Edwards.”

“You do this for me, Michael. Thank you for my life.” There were the first beginnings of a smile. She placed her hand on his. It was soft and warm.

“At first we thought that they simply drove off the cliff road. We found this in the vehicle.” The major of field police held up the top of a broken bottle of vodka. “But the medical corpsman who collected their personal effects found this.”

The major pulled the rubberized sheet off the one body that had been thrown clear when the vehicle hit the rocks. The stab wound in the chest was unmistakable.

“And you said that the Icelanders were as peaceful as sheep, Comrade General,” the KGB colonel observed sardonically.

The major continued, “It is difficult to reconstruct exactly what happened. There was a farm a short distance away whose house was burned to the ground. We found two bodies in the wreckage. Both had been shot.”

“Who were they?” General Andreyev asked.

“Impossible to identify the bodies. The only way we knew they were shot was the bullet hole in the sternum, so that was likely done at very close range. I had one of our surgeons look at them. A man and a woman, probably in their middle years. According to a local government official, the farm was occupied by a married couple with one daughter, age”—the major checked his notes—“twenty. The daughter has not been found.”

“What of the patrol?”

“They were southbound on the coast road when they disappeared—”

“No one spotted the fires?” the KGB colonel asked sharply.

“There was heavy rain that night. Both the burning vehicle and the farmhouse were below the horizon for the neighboring observation patrols. As you know, the road conditions here have upset our patrol schedules, and the mountains interfere with radio performance. So when the patrol was late getting in, no particular note was made of it. You can’t see the vehicle from the road, and as a result they were not spotted until the helicopter flew over it.”

“The other bodies, how did they die?” the General wanted to know.

“When the vehicle burned, the soldiers’ hand grenades cooked off, with the obvious results. Except for the sergeant here, there is no telling how they died. So far as we can tell, no weapons were taken. All the rifles were there, but some items are unaccounted for: a map case and some other minor things. Possibly they were blown clear of the vehicle by the explosions and fell into the sea, but I doubt this.”

“Conclusions?”

“Comrade General, there is not a great deal to go on, but I surmise that the patrol visited the farmhouse, ‘liberated’ this bottle of vodka, probably shot and killed the two people who lived there, and burned the house. The daughter is missing. We are searching the area for her body. At some time after this happened, the patrol was surprised and killed by an armed party which then tried to make their deaths look like a vehicle accident. We should assume that there is at least one band of resistance fighters at large.”

“I disagree,” the KGB colonel announced. “Not all the enemy troops have been accounted for. I think that your ‘resistance fighters’ are probably NATO personnel who escaped when we took Keflavik. They ambushed our troops, then murdered the farm people in the hope of stirring the local population against us.”

General Andreyev shared a furtive look with his major of field police. It had been a KGB lieutenant commanding the patrol. The
chekisti
had insisted that some of their people accompany the roving patrols. Just what he needed, the General thought. Bad enough that his crack paratroopers were consigned to garrison duty—always destructive to unit morale and discipline—but now they were jailers, too, and in some cases commanded by jailers. So the arrogant young KGB officer—he’d never met a humble one—had thought to have himself some fun. Where was the daughter? The answer to this mystery certainly lay with her. But the mystery wasn’t the important thing, was it?

“I think we should interrogate the local inhabitants to see what they know,” the KGB officer announced.

“There are no ‘local inhabitants,’ Comrade,” the major answered. “Look at your map. This is an isolated farm. The nearest neighbor is seven kilometers away.”

“But—”

“Who killed these unfortunates, and why, is unimportant. We have armed enemies out there,” Andreyev said. “This is a military matter, not something for our colleagues in the KGB. I’ll have a helicopter search the area around the farm. If we find this resistance group, or whatever it is, we will deal with it as with any band of armed enemies. You may interrogate any prisoners we manage to capture, Comrade Colonel. Also, for the moment any KGB officer who accompanies our security patrols will be an observer, not a commander. We cannot risk your men in combat situations for which they have not been fully trained. So. Let me talk to my operations officer to see how we will handle the search. Comrades, you did well to bring this to our attention. Dismissed.” The chekist wanted to stay, but KGB or not, he was only a colonel, and the General was exercising his legitimate prerogatives as commander on the scene.

An hour later, a Mi-24 attack helicopter lifted off to check the area around the burned farm.

“Again?” Toland asked.

“Not a bank holiday, Commander,” the group captain replied. “Two regiments of Backfires departed their bases twenty minutes ago. If we want to catch their tankers, we must move smartly.”

Within minutes, two EA-6B Prowlers, designed to find and jam enemy radar and radio signals, were climbing to altitude on a northwest heading. Known with backhanded affection as the Queer, the EA-6B’s most striking characteristic was its canopies, inlaid with real gold to protect sensitive on-board instruments against electromagnetic radiation. As the planes climbed, their pilots and electronics officers were already working in their gilt cages.

Two hours later they spotted their prey, radioed back the signal bearings—and four Tomcats rolled down the runway of Stornoway.

Cruising at an altitude of thirty-six thousand feet the Tomcats flew racetrack-shaped patterns north and south of the predicted course for the Soviet tankers. Their powerful search/missile-guidance radars were shut down. Instead, they swept the skies with a built-in TV camera that could identify aircraft as far as forty miles away. Conditions were ideal, a clear sky with only a few high cirrus clouds; the fighters left no contrails that might warn another aircraft of their presence. The pilots curved their fighters around the sky, their eyes shifting out to check the horizon, then in to check engine instruments, a cycle repeated every ten seconds.

“Well, lookie here . . .” the squadron commander said to his weapons operator. The flight officer in the Tomcat’s back seat centered the TV camera on the aircraft.

“Looks like a Badger to me.”

“I don’t suppose he’s alone. Let’s wait.”

“Roge.”

The bomber was over forty miles off. Soon two more appeared, along with something smaller.

“That’s a fighter. So, they have fighter escorts this far out, eh? I count a total of . . . six targets.” The weapons operator tightened up his shoulder straps, then activated his missile controls. “All weapons armed and ready. Fighters first?”

“Fighters first, light ‘em up,” the pilot agreed. He toggled up his radio. “Two, this is Lead, we have four tankers and a pair of fighters on a course of about zero-eight-five, forty miles west of my position. We are engaging now. Come on in. Over.”

“Roger that. On the way, Lead. Out.” Two brought his interceptor into a tight turn and advanced his throttles to the stops.

The leader’s radar activated. They now had two fighters and four tankers identified. The first two Phoenixes would be targeted on the fighters.

“Shoot!”

The two missiles dropped clear of their shackle points and ignited, leading the Tomcat to the targets.

The Russian tankers had detected the fighter’s AWG-9 radar and were already trying to evade. Their escorting fighters went to full power and activated their own missile-guidance radars, only to find that they were still outside missile range to the attacking fighters. Both switched on their jamming pods and began to jink their aircraft up and down as they closed in hope of launching their own missiles. They couldn’t run away, there wasn’t enough fuel for that, and their mission was to keep the fighters off the tankers.

The Phoenix missiles burned through the air at Mach 5, closing the distance to their targets in just under a minute. One Soviet pilot never saw the missile, and was blotted from the sky in a ball of red and black. The other did, and threw his stick over, a second before the missile exploded. It nearly missed, but fragments tore into the fighter’s port wing. The pilot struggled to regain control as he fell from the sky.

Behind the fighters, the tankers split up, two heading north, the other pair south. The lead Tomcat took the northern pair and killed both with his remaining two Phoenixes. His wingman racing up from the north fired two missiles, hitting with one, and missing with the other, as the missile was confused by the Badger’s jamming gear. The Tomcat continued to close, and fired another missile. By this time he was close enough to track the bird visually. The AIM-54 missile ran straight and true, exploding only ten feet from the Badger’s tail. Hot fragments ripped into the converted bomber and detonated the remaining fumes in its refueling tanks. The Soviet bomber disappeared in a thundering orange flash.

The fighters swept their radars around the sky, hoping to find targets for their remaining missiles. Six more Badgers were a hundred miles off, but they had already been warned by the leading tankers and were heading north. The Tomcats didn’t have enough fuel to pursue. They turned for home and landed at Stornoway an hour later with nearly dry tanks.

“Five confirmed kills and a damage,” the squadron commander told Toland. “It worked.”

“This time.” Toland was pleased nevertheless. The U.S. Navy had just completed its first offensive mission. Now for the next one. Information was just in on the Backfire raid. They’d hit a convoy off the Azores, and a pair of Tomcats was waiting two hundred miles south of Iceland to meet them on the return leg.

“Our losses have been murderous,” said the General of Soviet Frontal Aviation.

“I will tell our motor-rifle troops just how serious your losses have been,” Alekseyev replied coldly.

“We have lost nearly double our projections.”

“So have we! At least our ground troops are fighting. I watched an attack. You sent in
four
attack fighters.
Four!”

“I know of this attack. There was a full regiment assigned, more than twenty, plus your own attack helicopters. The NATO fighters are engaging us ten kilometers behind the front. My pilots must fight for their lives simply to get where your tanks are—and then all too often they are engaged by our own surface-to-air missiles!”

“Explain,” ordered Alekseyev’s superior.

“Comrade General, the NATO radar surveillance aircraft are not easy targets—they are too well protected. With their airborne radar, they can vector their fighters against ours to launch their missile attacks from beyond visual range. When our pilots learn that they are being attacked, they must evade, no? Do your tankers sit still to give their enemies an easy shot? This often means that they must drop their bombs to maneuver. Finally, when they do manage to reach the battle zone they are frequently shot at by friendly missile units who don’t take the time to distinguish between friend and foe.” It was an old story, and not merely a Soviet problem.

“You are telling us that NATO has command of the air,” Alekseyev said.

“No, they do not. Neither side does. Our surface-to-air missiles deny them the ability to control the air over the battle line, and their fighters—helped by their surface-to-air missiles, and ours!—deny it to us. The sky over the battlefield belongs to no one.”
Except the dead,
the Air Force General thought to himself.

Alekseyev thought of what he had seen at Bieben, and wondered how correct he was.

“We must do better,” the Theater Commander said. “The next massed attack we launch will have proper air support if it means stripping fighters from every unit on the front.”

“We are trying to get more aircraft forward by using deceptive maneuvering. Yesterday we tried to feint NATO’s fighters to the wrong place. It nearly worked, but we made a mistake. That mistake has been identified.”

“We attack south of Hannover at 0600 tomorrow. I want two hundred aircraft at the front line supporting my divisions.”

“You’ll have them,” the Air Force General agreed. Alekseyev watched the flyer leave.

“So, Pasha?”

“That’s a start—if the two hundred fighters show up.”

“We have our helicopters, too.”

“I watched what happens to helicopters in a missile environment. Just when I thought they’d blast a hole through the German lines, a combination of SAMs and fighters nearly annihilated them. They have to expose themselves too greatly when they fire their missiles. The courage of the pilots is remarkable, but courage alone is not enough. We have underestimated NATO firepower—no, more properly we have overestimated our ability to neutralize it.”

“We’ve been attacking prepared positions since this war began. Once we break into the open—”

“Yes. A mobile campaign will reduce our losses and give us a much more even contest. We have to break through.” Alekseyev looked down at the map. Just after dawn tomorrow, an army—four motor-rifle divisions, supported by a division of tanks—would hurl itself into the NATO lines. “And here seems to be the place. I want to be forward again.”